What an SEO company does
An SEO company works on your website so that search engines can find and understand it, and so that people searching can decide whether to visit. Google lists the usual services as reviewing your content and structure, technical advice, content development, campaign management, keyword research, training, knowledge of particular markets and places, and optimising for generative AI.
What it can’t do is buy you a place. Google says it never accepts money to include or rank sites in its search results, and it costs nothing to appear in the organic (unpaid) results.
General information, not business advice. The authority on how Google Search works is Google Search Central. Every rule on this page comes from Google Search Central or business.gov.au, linked at the foot.
The services, one line at a time
The left column is Google’s own list of services that SEO agencies and consultants commonly provide. The middle column is what Google’s documentation, or business.gov.au, says about that kind of work. The right column is a question worth writing in the margin of any proposal that offers it.
| Service | What the documentation says | A question for the agency |
|---|---|---|
| Review of your site’s content or structure | Google’s SEO Starter Guide covers helping Google find your content, checking that Google sees a page the way a visitor does, and organising your site. | Which pages did you review, and what did you find? |
| Technical advice on website development | Google’s examples are hosting, redirects, error pages and the use of JavaScript. | What will change on the site itself, and who makes each change? |
| Content development | Google asks for “people-first” content, and lists warning signs of content made mainly to attract search visits, such as writing to a set word count. It says it has no preferred word count. | Who writes it, who checks the facts, and who owns it once it’s published? |
| Management of online business development campaigns | The Starter Guide names social media, community engagement, advertising and word of mouth as ways to promote a site, and warns that overdoing it can look to search engines like manipulation. | Which channels, and are any of them paid? |
| Keyword research | business.gov.au describes keywords as the words or phrases a customer uses when they search, and warns that overusing them can harm your SEO. Google calls keyword stuffing a breach of its spam policies. | How did you choose these words, and where will they appear? |
| SEO training | Google suggests learning the basics yourself, so you can tell when an SEO wants to use a technique that isn’t recommended. | Will you show us how to check your work? |
| Expertise in specific markets and places | Google’s suggested interview questions ask about experience in your industry, in your country or city, and with international sites. | What have you done for businesses like ours, here? |
| Optimising for generative AI | Google suggests checking that advice about “AEO” or “GEO” services lines up with its official guidance on optimising for generative AI features. | Which Google document is this advice based on? |
That last question works for every row. Google’s guidance on third-party advice says good advice either presents its claims as opinion based on data or experience, or backs them up by citing official Google Search guidance.
What no SEO company can sell you
Some things are outside any agency’s reach, however the pitch is worded. Google is direct about each of them.
A paid place in the resultsGoogle says it never accepts money to include or rank sites in its search results. It doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more often, either.A guarantee that a page will appearGoogle doesn’t guarantee that it will crawl, index or serve a page, even one that follows the Google Search Essentials. Its Starter Guide puts it more simply: there are no secrets that will automatically rank your site first.Google’s own ranking dataThird-party SEO tools don’t have access to Google’s internal ranking data, and Google says they can’t guarantee performance.A lift from buying adsAdvertising with Google won’t have any effect on your site’s presence in its search results.
Doing some of it yourself
Google’s advice to a small local business is that you can probably do much of the work yourself, beginning with the SEO Starter Guide, which describes much of what an SEO would do for you.
Even if you hire in the end, the reading pays for itself: knowing the techniques lets you notice when an SEO proposes one that isn’t recommended, or one that’s strongly discouraged. Whether or not you use other tools, Google strongly encourages using Search Console, its own first-party tool, which gives you data directly from Google Search.
Read the Starter Guide before the first meeting. It’s the agency’s textbook too.
When hiring makes the most sense
Google names two moments: when you’re considering a site redesign, and when you’re planning to launch a new site. Hiring early, it says, means the site can be designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. A good SEO can also help improve an existing site.
If you do hire, the next pages help with the choosing: the questions to ask, the red flags to strike out and a sample proposal read line by line.
“The earlier, the better,” Google says of bringing an SEO into a redesign.